GLR September-October 2024

Trauma for Sale

T HE DOCUMENTARY Conver sion opens on a black screen with white lettering informing the viewer that 689,000 LGBT adults have gone through “conversion therapy”— indoctrination programs for young people struggling with their sexual orientation that claim they can help them convert from gay

Each story is told in stages through the course of the film, which also examines the particular hold of conversion therapy in re ligious communities and its powerful reach through charismatic male leaders like Alan Chambers and Joe Dallas of Focus on the Family, and McKrae Game of Hope for Wholeness. We eventually learn that some

A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

CONVERSION Directed by Zach Meiners Produced by Chronicle Cinema

of these men resisted their own gay inclinations and used what ever pseudo-psychological expertise they acquired to fashion themselves as “counselors” with a professional-sounding lingo and a well-rehearsed behavioral model known as “reparative therapy.” These tactics impress enough parents who can’t ac cept their gay kids to get them to throw away their money and enrich these conversion therapy grifters. A recurring motif is a series of contemporary model rooms that appear under voiceovers that tell the story of conversion in America (often with little connection to the narrative). The mod els, like updates of Victorian doll houses, present perfectly pro portioned furnishings and decorations: couches, armchairs, conference tables, window frames, and pictures hung on walls. They seem intended to con vey an ideal of “normalcy” sought by the pro-conver sion warriors, but also operate as a haunting metaphor for the warmth and security sought by Zach, Dustin, and Elena. Occasionally they allude to details dis cussed in the film, like a shot of a miniature Bible rest ing on a coffee table, or popular conversion therapy books fleetingly glanced and waiting to be read, such as Joe Dallas’ Desires in Conflict . The miniature rooms are sometimes lit with “sunshine” or “street light” through a small window; sometimes the rooms remain dark and somber. In their stately calm, like that in an Edward Hopper painting, these dollhouse rooms evoke an elegiac quality that underscores the film’s vein of sorrow and lament. Two speakers in the film share their expertise as longtime students of conversion therapy. Wayne Besen is an anti-conversion activist who speaks bluntly about the way in which the “conversion industry” feeds off dubious claims of success at permanently altering anyone’s sexual ori entation. Dr. Kelsey Burke, a psychologist who brings a calm but informed analysis to the origins of conversion therapy, places less of the onus on evangelical Christianity and more on the post-World War II upsurge in the practice of psychoanaly sis, some practitioners of which went to “great lengths” to re orient their patients’ sexual orientation, resorting to such practices as electroshock and aversion therapy. The film’s overall tenor is dour. Dustin Rayburn and Elena Joy Thurston locate key moments in their sexual development as children in the experience of a rape to which each was vic tim. But if Dustin and Elena’s stories eventually lead to separate epiphanies—with Dustin fleeing to construct a fresh profes sional drag identity in New York City, and Elena leaving her

to straight. The film’s first images show us driving through a calm suburban neighborhood. In voiceover, Troy Stevenson re counts his meeting up years earlier, at fifteen, behind school with a friend of the same age, holding hands and talking. A group of school footballers catches sight of them and hurls anti gay slurs. The boys run off to their separate homes and later speak on the phone. Trey’s friend is deeply upset, worrying that if his parents find out, they will send him back to a conversion program he’s already been through once before. He is deathly afraid. Trey plans to speak to him the next day, but he can’t. His friend has committed suicide.

Director Zach Meiners shows off one of the model rooms from Conversion .

The film that follows is a personal investigation by its di rector, Zach Meiners, into the world of conversion therapy, a network of programs that go under such names as Exodus In ternational, Love in Action, Opt for Life, and Focus on the Fam ily. Zach is one of the film’s three main subjects. He was a typical youngster who joined the Boy Scouts and soon discov ered that he wasn’t interested in girls like the rest of the gang. Next, Dustin Rayburn recalls a boyhood under the disciplinary eye of his father, a pastor and a “man’s man.” Elena Joy Thurston, a woman raised in the Mormon Church, marries at twenty and has four children by age thirty. Through an intense female friendship, she realizes her lesbian inclinations and the depths of her unhappiness. Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime contributor to these pages, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford Univ. Press, 2021). 46

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